Percieved Perceptions

I was perusing the Runes of Magic forums, and today, among others but especially today, it was so depressing. RoM is obviously and by far the best Free-to-Play MMORPG on the market right now. It’s down right revolutionary.

Of course it is using an Item Mall to make money but even it is well made, offering only items that speed up progress within the game and not allowing spenders to obtain anything that cannot be obtained strictly in-game.

Even still, the forums are as plagued, and in some cases more, by people bashing the devs as money grubbing idiots, and how stupid the Item Mall is, and a long list of other complaints. I know you have this in any game, but how great the game is added with my personal love of it, has me feeling a more personal sting this time around from the negative community.

A big part of it is always the assumption card. People make fun of the word assume because it is such an old cliche but it will be around until the end of time, because although people ridicule it as an old passe adage, it is the most succint and relevant way to describe the reoccuring situations.

People are forgetting fun for fun’s sake and trying to label it for you and I.

Don’t try to tell me what I like or don’t like, okay? Okay!

People want to try and attach an arbitrary number on the amount of things you can do in the game to how much fun can be derived from that game.

People. You can spend 100 hours picking your nose and have more fun than the guy who spent that same 100 hours playing WoW, EQ2, Vanguard, and every other MMO in one long session!

I am refering directly to the crafting aspect of RoM. People are bashing it as simple, pathetic, broken and usually the “excuse“- Yes, I use the word excuse because that’s all it is, that it takes too long to gather or you don’t get what you put into it. On the surface this is true, but like Mystic World’s said

[paraphrase]I don’t know where the time went. I know I was doing something and having a lot of fun doing it, but I don’t seem to have accomplished anything. My brain wants to play bad-cop and say I should be getting more out of the game to have fun, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter because…I had a lot of fun.

That is the truth, the reality of it. Let’s stop comparing to every MMO that’s come out before RoM and see what is giving us a fun time.

I’ve spent hours just “click-click-clicking” to gather, but at the end of the day, I pass out in front of my PC with a smile on my face, and have to be honest with myself-no lying allowed, I had a lot of fun.

“It’s not worth crafting, because the mats cost more than the finished product that uses the same mats.” Yeah, maybe so what? Did you have fun? Because that’s why your playing…ISN’T IT???

As a side note: I totally understand the analytical report, I read, on WoW now that said ‘40% of WoW players don’t play because they have fun’.

Unfortunately this will fall on def ears. These same nay-sayers are the ones who can’t swallow their pride. They feel threatened and want to win the argument for the sake of winning the argument, not learning and growing, and figuring out how to make life easier for themselves and find more fun and happiness in games and the world.

I love talking about what can make a game more fun or developing a “better” system, but don’t try to boil your ‘failure to have fun‘ down to something that obviously is only your perceptions that it’s the games responsibility to “give” you that fun. If you aren’t having fun with the way RoM’s current crafting system is, then don’t do it. If that leads you to having less fun than you think you could be having elsewhere, then leave the game and find a better experience for yourself-it’s up to you. But these players are always still around, which leads me to believe you are still playing RoM for a reason? So what is it? that you are having fun? or that your too stupid to know whether you are having fun or not? If it’s the former, then why isn’t that reflected in your community involvement, instead we hear unapologetic whining and screaming and calling other people names? Your extreme complaining does not seem to accurately reflect(not even closely) how you feel about your gaming experience, so most experienced/older/more learned players are just going to ignore you(and that would probably include the developers).

So forgive me if I care less about your comments that say “Actually, I really don’t like this or that” or any variant of that sentence. Perhaps that will be closed minded of me and I’ll just be doing what all of the negative complainers are doing, but it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to.